Research Ranking of African Universities

I suppose it should no longer be surprising that university heads flock to Johannesburg for the unveiling of an "experimental" research ranking of 30 African universities that put the University of Port Harcourt in 6th place, did not include Cairo University, the University of Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello University or the University of Nigeria Nsukka, placed Makerere above Stellenbosch and Universite Cadi Ayyad above the University of Pretoria.

It is still a bit odd that African universities seem to have  ignored a reasonable and sensible research ranking from the Journals Consortium that I found while reading an article by Gerald Ouma in the Mail and Guardian Africa, which, by the way, had an advertisement about Universite Cadi Ayyad being number ten in the THE African ranking.

The Journals Consortium ranking is based on publications, citations and web visibility and altogether 1,447 institutions are ranked. The methodology, which is a bit thin, is here.

Here are the top ten.
1.   University of Cape Town
2.   Cairo University
3.   University of Pretoria
4.   University of Nairobi
5.   University of South Africa
6.   University of the Witwatersrand
7.   Stellenbosch University
8.   University of Ibadan
9.   University of Kwazulu-Natal
10. Ain Shams University

The University of Port Harcourt is 36th and Universite Cadi Ayyad is 89th.

I am pleased to note that two of my former employers are in the rankings, University of Maiduguri in 66th place and Umar ibn Ibrahim El-Kanemi College of Education, Science and Technology (formerly Borno College of Basic Studies) in 988th.

This is also really frightening

From The Times, which is supposed to be a really posh paper -- I remember adverts "Top People Read the Times" -- read by people with degrees from Russell Group universities:

"Of the 3 million Muslims in Britain, about 2.3 million identify as Sunni, compared with 300,000 Shias, or 5 per cent of the total. Most British Shias have roots in Iran, Iraq, Azer­baijan or ­Bahrain. Sunnis make up the vast majority of Muslims worldwide."

This is really frightening

The evidence that human intelligence is falling continues to accumulate. PISA scores in Sweden are down and not just among immigrants. The intelligence of US marines, as measured by the General Classification Test, has been in decline since the 1980s. Based on "a small, probably representative sample" the French national IQ has dropped since 1999.

And now we have this from an article about the possible revival of the Liberal Democrats by Jon Stone, who is a reporter, in the Independent, which is a newspaper.

"Lazarus is a character in the Christian holy book The Bible who comes back from the dead after an intervention by Jesus Christ, a religious figure."

I thought the Independent was one of the posh papers read by bright people who had degrees and knew how ignorant and illiterate UKIP supporters were.

Does Jon Stone really think he has to explain to his readers what the Bible is? Or is this some sort of PC policy?

The worse thing is that he apparently doesn't know that Lazarus was really a character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

The Plague of Authorship Inflation

An article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Lee Hotz describes the apparently inexorable increase in the number of authors of scientific papers.

In 2014 according to the Web of Science the number of papers with 50 or more authors reached over 1400 and the number with 500 or more was over 200. The situation is getting so bad that one journal, Nature, was unable to list all the autors of a paper in the print edition .

Hotz has an amusing digression where he recounts how scientists have listed a hamster, a dog and a computer as co-authors

One issue that he does not explore is the way in which multi-authorship has distorted global university rankings. Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters until this year declined to use fractional counting of citations in their World University Rankings so that every one of hundreds of contributors was credited with every one of thousands of citations. When this was combined with normalisation by 250 fields so that a few citations could have a disproportionate effect and a deceptive regional modification that rewarded universities for being in a country that produced few citations then the results could be ludicrous. Unproductive institutions, for example Alexandria University, those that are very small,  for example Scuala Normale Superiore Pisa, or very specialised, for example Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, have been presented by THE as world leaders for research  impact.

Let us hope that this indicator is reformed in the forthcoming world rankings.